MONTRÉAL, March 24, 2017 /CNW/ – Kaloom Inc., a Montréal and Silicon Valley based software start up, building the next generation networking solution to revolutionize the data center, today announced that it has closed on a US $10.7 million committed Series A equity funding round, led by the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, with the participation of Somel Investments Inc., MBUZZ Investments Inc., Griffin Fund II, LP and other current investors and the company’s officers. The transaction closed in December, 2016.
Based in Montréal and Silicon Valley, Kaloom is building the Kaloom Flow Fabric™, a software networking solution that will revolutionize the data center. In particular, the Kaloom Flow Fabric™ will allow all virtual network functions (VNF) to run at scale utilizing commodity hardware, merchant silicon and existing data center architecture. The benefits of the Kaloom Flow Fabric™ include a major reduction in cost while at the same time providing a massive increase in performance including ultra-low latency and vast scalability.
“Kaloom is building a solution that is critical and well timed as the demands on data center operators and customers increase and the hyper-scale data center market evolves to serve telecom, financial services, government, healthcare and related markets. The shift to open networking and white box appliances dictate that the old way of doing things in networking is rapidly coming to an end. Kaloom is well positioned, through its experienced management team and highly technical engineering group, to capitalize on this trend. We are also very excited that a company such as Kaloom will base its engineering, support and related functions in Montréal, thus taking advantage of the high quality, technical workforce available in the Province of Québec,” said Alain Denis, Senior Vice-President, Innovation at Fonds de solidarité FTQ.
The Kaloom Flow Fabric™ is synergistic with the latest industry technology trends including open networking and the use of Container based virtualization. Designed with a heavy carrier grade focus, the Kaloom solution provides a completely lossless environment to ensure consistent connectivity and high availability.
Simon Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Kaloom noted, “I have spent my entire career in the networking industry. The seismic shift that is taking place in networking around hyper-scale, open networking and the rise of white box solutions is like nothing I have ever seen. The Kaloom solution is designed explicitly with this new wave fully in mind and will allow our customers to benefit from this shift and deliver unsurpassed performance, scale and reliability in a way never before seen. We are delighted to partner with our investors, including the Fonds de solidarité FTQ and Somel Investments as their vision and support enable us to begin our journey to transform the networking industry as we know it.”
Most of Kaloom’s R&D is in Montréal where Kaloom is situated near multiple renowned technical universities. This gives Kaloom access to top technical talent as well as university based data centers, labs and other R&D projects relevant to what Kaloom is building.
“By investing in Kaloom, we hope to establish an ecosystem in Québec supporting the explosive growth of companies developing smart technologies. It is our view that these technologies will bring with them a technological revolution, driven by the advancement of artificial intelligence, that is faster and more impactful than the industrial and social-media revolutions before its time,” said Sophie Gupta, Managing Director of Somel Investments Inc.
Laurent Marchand, Co-Founder and CTO of Kaloom observed, “The Kaloom solution represents the epitome of where networking is heading. I am very proud to be part of creating jobs in Québec while taking advantage of the strong technical talent that is available. I am also thrilled to partner with our tier one investors and thank them for their support. I look forward to an exciting future as we grow Kaloom to a world class company.”
Kaloom is currently growing the team both in Montréal and Silicon Valley. Kaloom plans to release more product information and provide product demonstrations in 2017.
About the Fonds de solidarité FTQ
The Fonds de solidarité FTQ is a development capital fund that channels the savings of Québecers into investments. As at November 30, 2016, the organization had $12.2 billion in net assets, and through its current portfolio of investments has helped create and protect over 187,000 jobs. The Fonds is a partner in more than 2,600 companies and has nearly 618,000 shareholder-savers. fondsftq.com
About Somel Investments Inc.
Somel Investments Inc. is a small private equity company that was founded in 2015 following the sale of a family-owned global telecom business, SDP Telecom Inc. Based in Montréal, Somel’s investment thesis exclusively targets high-tech emergent-growth companies, with a specific focus on IoT (internet of things) and the industries that leverage such applications. Somel employs the technical and operational expertise and knowhow of its founding partners to support the companies in its investment portfolio and help them achieve their growth objectives.
About Kaloom Inc.
Kaloom is a group of technology veterans with a proven track record of delivering large scale networking solutions for the world’s biggest networks. Coming from leading companies including Ericsson, Redback Networks, 3Com, Nortel and Apple, Kaloom is building a critically needed solution to address the biggest transformation in networking that those at Kaloom have seen in their lifetimes. The Kaloom team sees a “perfect storm” forming in the networking industry and recognize that no existing solutions from incumbent or emerging vendors are addressing the fundamental challenges ahead. Kaloom was formed specifically to address these challenges and is developing world class technology to allow its customers to fully embrace and leverage these new opportunities in networking and emerge with the highest performance, lowest cost and greenest network possible. Kaloom is based in Montréal and Silicon Valley. kaloom.com
